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When every reviewer uses the same set of words or phrases to describe
a book, it means either that the tale is universal, transparent and easily
understood or the exact opposite; it is impenetrable & the reviewer
gave up and went with the consensus viewpoint. So when you see these
words--"intricate", "labyrinthine", "byzantine"--in all of the reviews
of this book, you know you are in trouble; these are not adjectives that
lead one to believe that the story will be readily understandable.
But, they are accurate; this book is so complex as to be incomprehensible.
I finally gave up on this one after trying to read it about five different
times.

The best Historical Fiction takes great events with which we are familiar
but brings an added human dimension to them, first by fleshing out the
basic situations via fictional narrative techniques (dialogue, characters
thoughts, etc.), but second, by taking the historical context and peopling
it with living characters. There is a great difference between the
Claudius of a Roman History book and the Claudius of Robert Graves' novels.
Graves' achievement is that he breathes life into Claudius and makes him
a virtual contemporary of ours, which adds immediacy to the historic circumstances
and gives us a vested interest in what occurs. History essentially
is transformed into the present.

In All Soul's Rising, on the other hand, Bell plops the reader down
in the midst of the incredibly violent Haitian revolt at the turn of the
19th Century and through the use of shifting perspectives, allows the reader
access to the experiences of those caught up in it, but he provides no
context for what is occurring. Basically he's trying to tell
the story of a riot from the viewpoint of the rioters; there's just a whirl
of events, the meaning of which is impossible to decipher. There
are scenes of elaborate torture and violence, but we are so deeply thrust
into the story that we have no idea how they connect back to the tides
of history. The book seems to be about nothing more than the racial
violence itself, disconnected from any rhyme or reason.

Perhaps this is partly Bell's intent, to demonstrate that all racial
violence is senseless? I do know that in one
of the interviews below, he says that he sees the Haitian Uprising
as a metaphor for American race relations. Huh? In what conceivable
way are they comparable? The only really significant outbreak of
violence in the history of American race relations is the Civil War, when
whites fought each other over the issue. Jim Crow, while a
repellent feature of our History, was brought to an end with virtually
no violence at all (the murders of Civil Rights workers the sporadic church
bombings and the police attacks on demonstrators stand out precisely because
they were the exception to the rule). Perhaps Bell's interest in
tying the Revolt to American History caused him to lose sight of Haitian
and French History and to cut the story loose from it's historical moorings.
Whatever the case, with his focus wholly on particular isolated events,
Bell fails to place the entire story into any broader context; like the
blind men describing an elephant, all is detail, there is no whole.

Comments:

Your review concerning All Souls Risng displayed an ignorance concerning the racial issues in America. Did you know that while the rivers were being dragged in search of the civil rights workers who were killed hundreds of murdered blacks were discovered. How about the spectacle lynchings that were so popular in the early 1900's. Postcards of lynchings could be sent to loved ones. What about the Ku Klux Klan? You might want to read books by Stetson Kennedy. He infilitrated the KKK. "Mysterious" deaths of black people were labeled as accidents. Writers like James Weldon Johnson, Zora Neale Hurston, Lillian Smith, and hundreds more detailAmerica's struggle with racial issues. Before you review a historical novel, know your history.